Chapter 12

Impostor

“It’s ridiculous,” I added. “There’s no onus to work! Nothing to stop everyone from being burdos. From spending more than they have year after year. In fact, there’s nothing to stop a person from simply refusing to work at all, yet still spending like a millionaire!”

“Almost nothing, beyond the approval of others.”

“Is that all?” I scathed.

“It’s enough. Especially with final account balances displayed on gravestones and memorial plaques. People decide their own epitaph. And most are motivated to avoid anything unflattering. But your concerns are well-founded. There are a few burdos, the most troublesome difficult enough for any system. But there are more workos. Indeed, as soon as the working week was reduced, many volunteered unpaid hours. Some like to keep busy. And some actually find work enjoyable and satisfying.”

“Then why not avoid saving work in the first place? Keep longer hours!”

Wilbur tried to reply, but each attempt was thwarted by hiccups of imperfectly suppressed amusement. Finally, he managed: “Perfectly ludicrous.” Then he saw my expression. “That wasn’t a joke?!”

“Of course not. The fear of unemployment couldn’t have been that easy to shed!?”

“There is no unemployment when people share work. Even when a job becomes redundant or unnecessary, its occupant is paid for the start of the next period as if they’re doing that work, while actually spending the time retraining for other necessary work. Of course, those costs are taken into account before the annual resetting of prices. As are payments to the disabled, the retired, anyone genuinely unable to work – they each receive credits of half the average income.”

I shook my head in disbelief. It was all too much to assimilate, let alone frame an intelligent response. “Generous,” I muttered.

“Fair and reasonable. Only those who deliberately and consistently choose not to contribute, but who are able to do so, receive no payments. And their account reflects their choice. In some regions, too, their voting privileges will eventually be suspended.”

“This…,” I began, feeling overwhelmed. “This all works?!”

“It certainly has worked. With the ability to remove unnecessary work, and to share what needs to be done, productivity has skyrocketed. Within a decade, most of the truly necessary work was done by half the previous number of people in half the time.”

“But the numbers are so rubbery. So manipulated. They just don’t seem real to me.”

“They are rubbery and manipulated, but they’re also as real as people want them to be. The figures on stock markets were also rubbery – little more than figments of hyperactive imaginations – yet people once chose to treat them as real. Numbers now in use may seem every bit as arbitrary, but they’re not just plucked from thin air. A lot of effort has gone into setting prices of goods, and the wages paid to produce them, so they better reflect community values and take into account all social and environmental costs. The extremes of your time – poverty-line wages and multi-million dollar executive salaries for example – simply no longer exist. Rubbery perhaps, but current wages and prices are more meaningful and fairer than any determined by profit-obsessed markets.”

“It must be so much work to process all the information. I can’t imagine how it could be attempted.”

“Quite easily. In essence it’s little different in scope from the old Gross Domestic Product estimates, but facilitated by a streamlined participatory form of democracy that makes considerable use of the Net.”

“How exactly?”

“I think you may have enough to digest for the moment. Besides, I have other things I need to go on with. I’ll return tomorrow morning.”

After Wilbur left, I found myself at a loose end. His lecture had overwhelmed me to the point that I just wanted to leave the subject alone, for a while at least.

I distractedly paced about the house, until I noticed the computer screen still adhered to the kitchen wall. Reminded of the Citizens’ Database, a sudden curiosity burned. I re-started the browser and found the website with little fuss. What would it have to say about events since 2025? What sort of life had my kids made for themselves? I entered Godfred’s details, but with my finger hovering over the ‘Enter’ key, I hesitated.

I’d been treating it all as something of a game, but what if I was wrong? What if this was not a dream? What if I found a way to return to my own time after learning about my children’s futures? If Godfred or Sylvia were going to win fame and fortune, for example, would my pleasure seeing them attain it be reduced by knowing it all along? Was it the trip and not the destination that mattered after all? Or what if I knew of some dreadful event – would I spend all the years beforehand trapped in fear and anticipation? Or would I try to take steps to avoid the woes, but perhaps ultimately only cause them? The sci-fi I was familiar with was full of these sorts of paradoxes, and while there was no clear consensus as to what was possible or likely, that in itself might be the most convincing reason to avoid the dilemma.

“But it is just a dream,” I tried to convince myself. “It’s not like I’d be learning anything real.”

I did not convince myself. Indeed, I belatedly realised that for all I’d learnt during this dream, the vast majority of it was general – the way society conducted itself, its approaches and systems – not anything specific about people, at least not any I knew in my own time, nor about historical events. Call me a coward, but I decided it would be prudent to maintain that habit. I hit the ‘Escape’ key, and exited the browser.

By that stage it was late afternoon. With a sound like the final tortured moments of a draining bath, my stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I helped myself to the contents of Ernest’s refrigerator and prepared myself a simple meal. I deliberately took it slowly, yet still my mind was elsewhere, going over my situation, its various interpretations and implications.

My mantra persisted, but more desperately, less convincingly. It had to be a dream.

“What I need now,” I eventually decided, after eating and cleaning up, “is a good distraction.” I needed to settle down, as I usually did, by losing myself in a good book. Or better, a good film. I picked up the TV remote and stumbled around with the controls until, a few frustrated attempts later, I managed to get the screen on and to list Ernest’s video collection. I scanned the titles, hoping for something suitably escapist. Most titles looked unfamiliar – just what my dream should be arranging, if there was supposed to be forty years of films I hadn’t seen. But I soon saw one title that I did recognise: ‘First Contact’. The ‘Star Trek’ film, apparently still popular well over half a century after it was released.

Why not, I thought. Something tried and proven. Haven’t seen it in years… or perhaps it was decades!

I used the remote to select the title, and a menu appeared, typical for a DVD film, but with a backdrop that bore no resemblance to any ‘Star Trek’ film I’d seen: there were several images, the main one causing me such sudden shock that I dropped the remote to the floor and began to quiver.

“What the…,” I mumbled, hurriedly turning my attention away from the screen to the wall, the floor, outside the window, anywhere but the screen. My breathing sped up, and I had to make a conscious effort to calm down.

Nervously, hesitantly, I picked up the remote, and dared to look at the TV screen again. The backdrop images were of an unfamiliar ringed planet, the earth from space, and a strange spacecraft from which exited several humanoids depicted on too small a scale for me to discern any detail. But there was no doubt about the foreground figure: the head of a humanoid yet non-human creature, identical to the one who had found me along the bush road.

A demon.

I again dropped the remote – it landed on its corner on the instep of my injured bare foot, mere centimetres from the bruise. I repressed a cry of pain and reflexively lifted my leg to inspect the thin red scratch forming where the remote had landed. “At this rate,” I muttered, “I’ll be an amputee before I get home.” But the new pain faded quickly and there was no obvious damage other than the scratch. Still, I hung onto my foot, delaying my next step (sic).

Finally, I summoned the resolve to face the screen again. A closer look at the demon’s face revealed subtle differences from the traditional image. Yes, it was scaly and had two horns on its forehead, but they were small, little more than bumps. He – or perhaps she – also had normal rounded, not spiked, ears, and the colour of the skin was not green or red or black but only slightly darker than a typical Caucasian’s. It was the nose that differed most: narrower than normal, it extended from the usual spot above the mouth to finish protruding above the eyes, and almost as wide there as at the lower extreme. The eyes themselves were dark red, almost black, and like a cat’s, without any white around the irises. There was also no evil-looking goatee beard, indeed no facial hair at all, including on the scalp. Though I hadn’t consciously noticed these subtleties when the lightning flash gave me my brief glimpse of the demon by the road, I had no doubt it was the same creature.

When I was able to tear my attention away from the face, I noticed words under the screen title: ‘The true story of humanity’s first visitors from the stars’.

“An alien!?” I gasped. “I really have read too much sci-fi.”

But my curiosity quickly took hold – I selected ‘play movie’, and started watching it.

Over a panorama of stars and galaxies, a voice full of gravity quietly intoned: “February 2, 2037. A pivotal date for humanity. Before, we had wondered. After, we were certain. We are not alone. Other life, other intelligences do inhabit other planets. And one had decided to pay us a visit.”

A close still shot of a demon-face. “At first,” continued the narrator, “our visitors invoked fear. Distrust. Panic… Yet that did not last.”

Cut to a long shot of people walking in great numbers along the street of a busy shopping area. “Now, their presence among us is taken for granted. We have become accustomed to them.” This confused me, for try as I might, I could not see any demon faces among the throng. The narrator continued. “Indeed, most of us would not even notice them were it not for their identifying bracelets.”

The TV screen cut to a close shot of a human arm adorned at the wrist with a prominent, unusual and very ornate gold-coloured bracelet.

The same bracelet worn by Wilbur.

I jumped in my seat. “What the—?!” I could feel my heartbeat racing, matched by my mind as it tried to grapple with this new information, to fit it into recent events, to try to work out why Wilbur wore a bracelet reputedly meant to identify an alien. Wilbur was clearly no demon, even if his sense of humour was hellish. What the devil was going on?

“How is it,” continued the narrator, “that the long-anticipated first contact with aliens from other worlds so quickly gave way to blithe disregard?” Cut to a similar shot of the spacecraft from the backdrop, with disembarking aliens. “This is the story of that first contact, how it was greeted, and the changes it wrought for humanity.”

At this point, my inner confusion prompted me to rewind and pause, to have a closer look at the wrist bracelet – which made me even more certain it was the same as Wilbur’s. What, indeed, was going on?

I was too distracted and fretful to continue watching the documentary, so I turned it off. But I desperately needed an outlet for my nervous energy, so I paced back and forth, as fast as my bruised toes would allow, trying to assimilate the new information, trying to think what it all might mean.

I gave up quickly, too impatient for an answer. I rummaged in the bedroom through the shoe collection until I found a pair of open-toed sandals (garishly green), put them on gingerly without buckling the one on my damaged foot (the pointy-toed shoes I wore earlier that day were not an option), and hobbled out the front door.

The sun had all but set when I reached Wilbur’s house. The morning storms long gone, I scanned the now perfectly clear sky for the moon – but without success. This only heightened my discomfort when I remembered the moon when I last saw it, on arriving home from work the night this convoluted dream began: a thick crescent high in the sky soon after sunset. Two days in Jibilee and a crescent moon had disappeared. I had to be dreaming. Unless the moon was on a needay.

Wilbur took some time to answer my knock, during which I noticed his carport was empty but his car was parked in front of the house. Odd I thought, before he opened his front door and the thought fled. I decided to go for broke, and spoke before he could even say hello. “You never told me there are aliens on the planet!”

For a moment, I thought his poker face quailed, but if so, he recovered too quickly for me to be sure. “The subject never came up,” he said, gesturing me inside.

I entered the house, fuming at his answer. “You could have told me anyway! It’s a fairly major event.”

“We had so many other matters to deal with, I just never gave it priority.” He led me to the lounge. “You just found out, I take it.”

“Yes, from one of Ernest’s videos.” He sat on a couch but I remained standing. And fuming. “But I don’t understand why you wear the same wrist bracelet as the aliens.”

He was clearly surprised. “You don’t?”

“No! You’re not an alien!”

“Well, yes, I am. Surely you—”

“Come off it Wilbur. If you’re an alien, what the hell happened to your face? Plastic surgery?”

Wilbur sighed and shrugged. Then, before my incredulous eyes, his face seemed to melt, then re-coalesce into that of a demon-alien.

I backed away, breathless and alarmed, my eyes fixed on his face. “What the—?”

“I told you,” he said, quietly, his voice deeper than normal, but with the same unusual accent.

“You didn’t tell me you could… could do that,” I said, waving vaguely at his face.

“Surely the vid mentioned my species is metamorphic?”

“Metamorphic?!” I parroted. “I only watched the first minute or so. When they mentioned your bracelet, I rushed over here for an explanation.”

“Well, I guess now you have it.”

For a while, I was lost for words – too many questions battled for priority. Wilbur must have misinterpreted, because his features melted again, back into his usual familiar face. “I’m sorry if my true appearance makes you uncomfortable,” he said, his voice regaining its usual pitch. “Most humans are affected the same way. That’s why my species now adopt native forms when we visit your planet.”

“Native forms!?” I grunted, before wondering if I should start enquiring about bird cage hire rates. Desperate to fill in the looming silence, I soon added, “Anyone I know?”

“Sort of. Wilbur Edmonds.”

My surprise mounted.

“The doctor who usually lives here,” continued Wilbur – the alien Wilbur anyway. “He’s now about halfway through his world trip.”

“You’ve been masquerading as him?”

“Hardly a masquerade, but yes, that’s the arrangement.” He held up his hand, displaying the bracelet. “There’s no deception as long as I wear this. It announces to everyone that I’m not the person I look like.”

“But why look like someone who’s known?” I was starting to calm down, enough to decide to sit – as far from Wilbur as the positions of the couches allowed.

“Convenience. Since Doctor Edmonds was not going to be here for a year, his house was made available to me over that time. As long as I was to live here, I might as well look like him as anyone else. The local community certainly never objected to the idea. Indeed, the people of Jibilee have been very accepting. They’ve made me feel very much at home. I shall miss many of them when I return to Orlanos.”

“Your planet?”

He nodded.

“So you aren’t even a doctor?”

“No.”

“What do I call you? Wilbur isn’t your real name, right?”

“No, it isn’t, but you can still call me by it. Everyone else here does.”

I was too curious to let it rest. “But what is your real name?”

“You’d be unable to pronounce it.”

“Try me.”

Wilbur made a few sibilant whistling noises punctuated by odd rolling consonants, with something in the middle resembling an anaemic raspberry, all of which amounted to a few syllables – but they were truly impossible for me to repeat.

Then I realised I had been deceived for several days. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I cried.

“To avoid you becoming even more disoriented than you already were.”

Reasonable, I thought. And reassuring. “So I really did see a demon? It was you.”

“Exactly. And you fainted at once. Very flattering in retrospect.” He smiled grimly.

“But why were you in your natural shape then? Why not like you are now?”

“A lapse on my part. I adopt my natural shape on Earth usually only when alone, as I was in the car when I found you. I simply forgot to revert to this appearance.”

“What really happened after I fainted?”

“You hit your head on a rock. So I took the precaution of asking Toby to examine you. Though you stayed unconscious the whole time, he thought the bump fairly minor, and advised just to keep an eye on you until you woke.”

“But why did you pretend to be a doctor?”

“Actually, I didn’t. I neither confirmed nor denied it when you falsely deduced it. Since you were so disoriented, so amnesiac, I thought it best not to nit-pick. There were more important memories to try to ignite, without overwhelming you with minor details.”

“But if you wanted to re-ignite lost memories, why did you hide your identity? Wouldn’t revealing it have helped me remember? If I was Ernest, that is.”

“It should have. And it was my intention. But when you recounted your memories, you didn’t mention seeing me as a ‘demon’, as you put it, when I found you by the roadside. I thought that a curious omission to say the least. No doubt my understanding of human psychology is less than perfect, but you seemed particularly uncomfortable and unsure about me, at least in my true form, so much so that either you felt obliged to lie about it or perhaps to force it from your memory. Either way, best not to bring it to your attention, I thought – it could have tipped your fragile state of mind further out of balance. Better instead to keep secret my true identity, at least until you were better able to handle such a revelation. That’s why I improvised the story about finding you on the doorstep. I rather regret the deception now. It would have been simpler to say you were found by the side of the road – but the thought came to me suddenly and I rather unwisely went with it. Perhaps I have read too many Earth fairy stories.”

“I believed you at the time,” I said, smiling grimly. “I thought the demon must have dumped me on your doorstep. Assuming I hadn’t dreamed him.”

“A dream within a dream?”

I nodded. “Hell! I didn’t have a clue what was going on at first. I’m not sure I do now.” After all, here I was in a perfectly ordinary room, having a quiet conversation with an alien!

Suddenly Wilbur yawned. “I’m sorry, Steven. Any other questions will have to wait. I really have to get some sleep. Maintaining a form other than my natural one takes a toll on me. Especially with your planet’s stronger gravity.”

“Er, sure,” I said, feeling suddenly intrusive. “Sorry.”

I returned to Ernest’s home and immediately watched ‘First Contact’ in full. It was informative and well put together, if occasionally pompous in tone.

Naturally it dwelt at some length on the shape-changing abilities of the ‘Orlanis’. They were not the typical sci-fi metamorph made of a fluid substance that could mould itself into the shape of anything from a flea to a skyscraper. Rather they were more like normal earthly creatures, with internal organs and a specific structure, but possessing very unearthly levels of bodily control (to the molecular level) not just over their exterior appearance but also their muscles, internal organs, even their unusually flexible skeletons. Exercising that control allowed them to reshape themselves markedly, to stretch and shrink and distort, even to warp the skin of their scalp into the semblance of hair. What squids do with colours, Orlanis could do with substance. But there were limits, from beyond which their true bodily parts could not recover. And they could not shed or gain mass in the process. So they could not turn into a full-sized elephant, only a scaled down version, and, given the extent of such a deformation, not for long.

Another surprising revelation was that while Orlanis were highly intelligent and adaptive creatures, with particular skill at quickly picking up alien languages, they found the human concept of humour baffling. Apparently, there was no such thing on their home planet. Not surprising then that they could rarely tell, let alone invent, a joke that humans found funny. Their failure, however, only fanned their desire to succeed – one trait at least which they shared with us.

Wilbur’s ‘jokes’ now took on new meaning. It was more fundamental than him simply having a poor sense of humour, as I had thought. Additionally, he was also a victim of trying too hard. It would probably never come to him as long as he tried to force it to happen; instead, he would just continue to seem awkward.

The documentary also claimed that Orlanis had similar problems with proverbs, despite their language skills. Usually, they found them obscure and alien (sic), which tended to lead not only to them being misunderstood but also mis-remembered. Again, I saw Wilbur in a new light.

The ultimate cause of all these differences, it was said, was the Orlanis’ different brain structure – the cause also of their more developed visual sense, which allowed them, among other things, to discern subtle mood shifts via slight changes to skin colour and complexion. This ability more than anything else enabled them to know (usually) when to react to human jokes, even though the joke almost inevitably soared over the tops of their metamorphic heads.

They had several other comparative advantages over humans, especially as regards mathematics and, to my surprise, singing (they could alter their larynx, at will, to generate almost any sound imaginable – a veritable orchestra in a voice-box).

There were reportedly several thousand Orlanis on Earth, studying human behaviour first-hand while teaching us about themselves and some of their more advanced technology and knowledge. In something like a cultural exchange program, a smaller number of humans had been transported to Orlanos for similar purposes.

Oddly enough, I was most taken aback by the claim that Orlanis used a similar economic and political system as that in force on Earth in 2065, but after operating it for more than a century, they had done away with money entirely. This followed, it was said, because the Orlanis had reduced their working week to so small a duration – barely an hour – that the book-keeping required to balance costs and prices became counter-productive, more work than it was worth. It was simpler and, in the words of the film, “more enlightened” to simply do an hour’s work each week for no monetary reward. No longer needing to pay for anything they wanted, the Orlanis were apparently both wealthy and cohesive enough to curb any inclination to indulge to excess.

I was surprised at first by their willingness to accept self-imposed limits, but then realised how it was simply an extension to the habits adopted and encouraged by a system long in place – it would have been more surprising for them to have abandoned those habits and reverted to practices not seen for more than a century.

While watching this part of the film, I wondered if first contact with Orlanis might have sparked the change on earth, that we might have adopted their systems. But the film soon informed me this was not the case: our systems were in place shortly before first contact was made. We had no saviours from above, only from within. Even so, I could not help but think that the proven fact of another intelligent life form in the universe must have humbled and ultimately united humanity, and so helped ease the changeover to a new system.

When the film finished, I felt restless again, which prompted my usual response, to surf the web. It hadn’t changed much: it was still full of diversions and crackpot ideas, playful home and personal sites, and a plethora of business addresses. But it was notably free of advertising, and had even more freebies than the considerable amount I was accustomed to finding.

It also lacked many of the sites I knew. Consequently, while sampling some of Ernest’s favourites, I discovered a site that claimed to have “almost any music ever recorded, any film ever made, any book ever written” – all available for free and completely legal downloading.

I felt compelled to research that claim, and soon found an explanation. Allegedly, there were still platinum albums, hit films, and million-seller novels, which still made their creators famous, but they did not make them rich. Fame followed in large proportion to the extent to which an artist’s work was downloaded, but also how much the download was appreciated. When a downloaded book was read, or a film watched, or a song or album played (for the third time), the downloader received an electronic request on their babel and/or computer to rate the product out of ten. People could ignore the request, in which case after a month, it automatically deleted itself. All ratings – able to be amended later if desired – contributed to a record of the number of people who had sampled the product and what they thought of it, which distinguished ‘successful’ artists from the rest. Those achieving a certain level of success were then funded by CAPE to continue full-time in their chosen fields, less successful others received part-time funding, the rest were left to pursue their muse in their spare time. The dividing line as to what constituted a ‘sufficient’ level of success was determined mostly by what could be absorbed by CAPE without detrimental effect on working hours or prices.

Success by those terms often proved fleeting, with one-hit wonders reportedly quite common. Although this did not convince me that popular artists should be prevented from amassing at least small fortunes for their efforts, I had to admit, after I got over my initial shock, that there were some positive aspects to the arrangement. It certainly gave everyone a chance to pursue their muse. Who knows, the garage band I toyed with in my mid-teens might have succeeded if such an approach had been in place at the time. And my life might have turned out quite differently.

The reliance on downloading computer files also meant that hard-copy books had become rare, except in libraries. Apart from a few devoted bookworms and academics, almost no one was willing to repeatedly pay for the more costly option of keeping their collections as actual books. Ernest’s spilling bookshelves clearly made him one of the exceptions.

I had to admit all of this must have avoided a lot of waste. Probably three quarters or more of my own collections had been read or viewed once, or played only a few times, then ignored or forgotten, and were now useful only as dust-collectors or coasters; I’d even once used a book (an ancient and unappreciated gift) as emergency fire-fodder.

Undoubtedly there was much more information available on the Net that I would have found interesting, and I could have easily spent many more hours surfing.

But I was prevented from doing so…